For comparison, we put Asetek's WaterChill kit, sporting both the 2x120mm radiator and 3x120mm separately, up against CoolerMaster's Jet4 in an open air configuration on our test bench (stock heatsinks where left in place during Jet4 testing). We strayed away from the stock Intel cooler becase a potential WaterChill kit buyers is probably a PC enthusiast who is upgrading their system from, or in the past has had, a high-end fan/sink combination. The Jet4 is a little bit different from other fan/sink combinations because it uses a blower, rather then your typical rotary fan. This difference in design is supposed to help eliminate the "dead-zone", which is found beneath the motor, where air can not typically reach on conventional fans. We also choose this fan because of its adjustable speed which corresponds nicely to the variable speeds of the WaterChill kit via the 7-12v jumper on the control module.

To start things off we fired up our test rig and set the fan speed to "low", 7v for the WaterChill kit and the slowest speed for the Jet4, and let it idle for about 20 minutes to assure the temperature had stabilized. We then took a temperature reading of the processor using the manufacture's monitoring software and record the results. We followed the same procedure for the load test, but ran two copies of Prime95 to ensure our P4 processor with Hyper Threading was being fully utilized.

In reference to the graphs above, you can see the difference in temperatures between the Jet4 and the WaterChill Kit. When the processor was Idle, the Jet4 was able to cool the processor to a respectable 89oF. However, the WaterChill kit was able to lower the temperature by an additional 9oF. The same trend occurred during the load test; the Jet4 maintained a temperature of 113oF while the WaterChill kit subdued the temperature to an impressive 86oF. The only other noteworthy area during this portion of testing was the temperature difference, or lack there of, between the two different sized radiators. It seems, at this point, that the addition of the extra 120mm fan had no impact on the overall cooling ability of the WaterChill system.

Stock Speed with High RPM's

Just like out of the box

This round of testing again used the same mythology as the CPU test above, but this time we maxed out the fan speed of both the WaterChill (set to 12v) and the Jet4 (fan speed set to high). The drop in temperature between the high and low settings is noticeable, but, the noise level surely increased with both cooling solutions. While the WaterChill's temperature dropped by about 2oF, the Jet4 took the biggest gain with a temperature drop of nearly 3oF. With that said, the WaterChill kit still took the overall cooling advantage while under full load.